Rants and raves about the mess of higher education in the United States.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Government Regulations Killing Education? Part 2

By Professor Doom

So last time
I examined an essay by a very highly paid
administrator (paid
to the tune of $650,000 a year) who insists that it isn’t highly paid
administration that’s the reason for high tuition. Instead, he claims it’s all
the regulations that must followed.

The first
part of his essay disregarded that those regulations came from so much
administrative abuse, and disregarded that if following NCAA regulations cost
too much, institutions could just stop throwing away money on useless sports
programs that do nothing for education and research. I emphasize that
“education and research” part because taxpayers are told to surrender their tax
money to support institutions for education and research…the institutions
promise to do so in writing; you can check the mission statement of any
institution of higher education and you’ll see nothing there saying the goal is
to put together a great sportsball team (or to provide ridiculously high paying
jobs to administrators).

$650,000 a year for this level of
honesty and intellectual acumen. The essay then heads into train-wreck
territory:

“Legitimate concerns about keeping every student safe and secure,
including complying with the federal Clery Act crime-reporting requirement, are
another driver of tuition costs. Recently, President Obama announced his
intention to hold colleges more accountable for how they handle allegations of
rape on their campuses. This drives increases in security as well as legal and
student-life staff.”

I’m guessing the administrator
doesn’t even know about the child sex abuse scandal at Penn
State? While his
tears here might be sincere, realize that if college administrators acted with
integrity, we wouldn’t have these laws (futilely) trying to get them to do
things that decent human beings do, like properly report rapes and such,
instead of covering them up.

As I discussed earlier in my blog,
it’s the administrator’s job to cover up horrible crimes on campus, since if
knowledge of those crimes got out, it would cut into growth and retention, the
true goals of administration (because, again, more growth means more pay for
the administrator)…I maintain that we need administrators with integrity and
devotion to the students; we used to get such administrators by drawing from
the faculty for short terms, rather than hiring from the roving pool of
mercenaries out for plunder. The regulations making students “safe and secure”
are due to how much harm our current type of administration has done to
students.

So, yes, it’s a shame that
there’s now a crime-reporting law for administration…but they brought that on
themselves by not reporting serious crimes like humans would do. Again I ask why
should students be punished for administrative misbehavior?There’s also a bit of hypocrisy
here. He’s worried about student safety? Most of those risks come from the
bloatedness of institutions that have focused on growth above all else: small
schools just don’t have the same level of crime problems as large schools. If
administration hadn’t sacrificed everything for growth, this wouldn’t be a concern.

Actually, there’s hypocrisy on
top of hypocrisy. Administration cares about student safety, but has no problem
signing up students for lifetimes of debt that they can never hope to repay? If
he cared about students, he’d probably stop making it so easy for students to
destroy themselves with student loans.

I find myself drowning in
crocodile tears here.The essay continues to try to
make a case:

“Here is our latest one—not driven by law but by federal administrative
fiat. It calls for the establishment of a central complaint system for all
military and veteran students and requires every institution to identify a
single point of contact for all complaints. That person must also document
every complaint, record the actions to respond to the complaint and resolve it,
as well as the outcome, all subject to federal scrutiny by several agencies.
Who will do this work?”

Here, the Poo-Bah almost has a
point. A strange federal law giving priority treatment to our
veterans…considering the shoddy treatment vets get, medically, I think it’s a
puny gesture by the federal government. It’s a shame the administrator
begrudges our veterans even that.

Unfortunately, accreditation
ALREADY has rules for student complaints, at every institution there’s already someone responsible for
documenting complaints (see, for example, section 4.5 on SACS Principles of Accreditation ). For $650,000 a year, the
Poo-Bah should know this is only a minor adjustment to rules his institution
(which, being in Florida, is part of SACS) should already be following.

Whoever is already doing the job
for all students, now has to put a note (or maybe just a “V”) by the complaints
that come from the students that are veterans. Big deal, cry me a river, man.

The train-wreck continues:

“I could go on with more examples, but I hope I have made my point.”

Actually, his examples of the
NCAA and veteran complaints demonstrate surprising ignorance for $650,000 a
year, and don’t make the point at all. His statements regarding oversight
illustrate a strange blind spot regarding administration’s role in the
corruption of higher education, and the myriad of regulations that are trying
to at least slow it down.

“Too much government” is an easy
point to make in just about every aspect of American life, but he’s not
managing it, somehow.

“Much, but certainly not all, of the much-maligned "administrative
bloat" is driven by external forces, societal demands, and regulations
from the federal government, the states, the NCAA, accreditors, and insurers.”

Normally one restates the thesis
near the end of the essay, but he’s jumped the gun a little here. I’m not
convinced he’s done much of a job arguing his case. Luckily, my Libertarian
leanings make it easy for me to concede that at least a small part of the
unnecessary bloat is due to government.

On the other hand, consider all
the academic fields that have sprung up and grown in the last few decades.
Computers, robotics, genetics, environmental studies, even, yes, God forgive me
for including it, gender studies and white-people-are-evil studies departments,
just to name a few new fields. And yet, there’s no comparable faculty growth at
all. A much stronger case could be made that there should be faculty bloat, to
cover all the new fields that exist now…and yet there is no such bloat.

In times past, faculty made up
the majority of people working on campus; now faculty are a minority, a small minority
when one considers most college courses are taught by minimally paid part time
laborers that don’t even count as faculty in many ways.

Hmm, there are an awful lot of
dogs-that-didn’t-bark in this essay. Could this $650,000 a year administrator
really not know all this stuff?

The train-wreck continues:

“Higher education is regulated by every cabinet-level department and
numerous subagencies.”

Yes, the education bloat goes
higher than just the institutions, I’ve mentioned that before, and I’m not sure
what he’s getting at, as he might get one of the stupidly-high paid department
jobs he’s complaining about. This has nothing to do with the thesis, since the
expense here isn’t paid via tuition (instead, it’s your tax dollars at non-work).
Yikes, he’s floundering here.

Next, the $650,000 a year
administrator states an unsourced fact. Let’s take it as truth:

Let’s do some math on those 106
employees spending 7,200 hours on federal compliance. That’s about 68 hours for
each employee, so two weeks of work. Seeing as there are 52 weeks in the year,
the Poo-Bah has made an excellent point about how there are way too many
administrators here. What, pray tell, are these 106 administrators doing the
other 50 weeks of the year?

I’ve discussed some of the make-work these guys perform to
fill time, but the
Poo-Bah’s example here shows that they use 106 people to do the work of at most
5 people…a whole building on campus to do the work of a handful of people. He’s
making an excellent point about how bad the bloat is.

Oh wait, he’s using this example
to show that there’s too much regulation, not realizing that he accidentally
gave too much information (i.e., the number of employees) so we can see how
there are too many administrators.

$650,000 a year for this.

The rest of his essay is crowing
from the $650,000 a year administrator about how he’s working hard to keep
costs down. Good for him that he’s doing something to be proud of. I encourage
the gentle reader to see with his own eyes I’m leaving nothing of
consequence out.

Next time, we’ll take a look at
the reality of the Poo-Bah’s institutional tax forms, to get a better idea of
the oceans of crocodile tears disgorging from the man’s eyes.